Mr Chairman of the
Committee of Ministers, Mr President of the Parliamentary Assembly,
Mr Secretary General, ladies and gentlemen, as has already been
said – and it is also our reason for being here together – forty
years ago to the day, ten European countries signed the convention
embodying the Statute of the Council of Europe. Today, this anniversary
is being celebrated by twenty- three states.

I feel it an honour to be here with you on this occasion as
I was nearly seven years ago.

For the war generation, the foundation of the Council of Europe
represented, so soon after the end of hostilities, resounding recognition
of the supremacy of our democratic values over totalitarianism.
The birth of the Council of Europe was seen as an act of faith in
a Europe pledged to human rights, as an appeal for reconciliation
and for unity in Europe.

The choice of Strasbourg as the site of the new institution
was also symbolic. The Alsatian capital, the victim fought over
in three successive wars, was – through the exorcism of the past
– to be the incarnation of European reconciliation. It would be
a good thing if that were better remembered.

As I contemplate the progress made since the Congress of The
Hague in 1948, an event dear to my heart for reasons you know –
the Chairman of the Committee of Ministers has just mentioned that
– I can appreciate the efforts made by your predecessors and yourselves,
the extent and quality and, I think, the historic significance of
those efforts. Allow me, then, to underline the merit of those women
and men who have contributed to this venture, to congratulate those
who, more recently, have set about giving it fresh momentum and
widening its influence. I must add my own thanks to those expressed
by the Secretary General to the President of your Assembly.

There has been continuity throughout these past years and
those whom you have chosen to organise and direct your work have
followed in the footsteps of the founding fathers.

Europe’s identity, what gives our continent its impact in
the world, rests on the values on the basis of which the Council
of Europe has developed its action. I would say simply, like you
and after you: the freedoms, all the freedoms; human rights, all
human rights. How, in this year when we are celebrating the bicentenary
of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, could
we fail to salute the decisive progress represented, with the European
Convention on Human Rights, by the unprecedented possibility afforded
to each and every European citizen to arraign his own state before
an international court of justice, the European Court of Human Rights?

This machinery is being constantly improved, whether we consider
procedures or the actual convention. I am thinking for example of
the prevention of torture, a convention on which was signed in 1987.

We know, of course, that serious breaches still occur in our
continent of what we regard as inalienable rights. Our free countries
must show solidarity in condemning those breaches, brooking no argument,
and demanding that they cease. It is up to the Council of Europe,
in this most important field, to exercise constant vigilance, to set
a moral example.

As the pioneer of its institutions, your Council marked the
beginning of Europe. Some months before the foundation of the OEEC,
later to become the OECD, it was also a precursor. Does not the
first article of its statute state the objective of: “achieving a greater unity between its members
for the purpose of safeguarding and realising the ideals and principles
which are their common heritage”?

The Council of Europe, in the words of the jurist Paul Reuter,
has become “the only organisation in
which all the European countries sharing a certain democratic ideal
can meet to discuss any European question”.

With the exception of defence problems, explicitly excluded
from its remit, there is no European issue that cannot be debated
in this chamber.

Your institution includes the twelve countries of the European
Community, the six of EFTA and five more states. I note that Finland
has joined the Council this very day, bringing the number of members
to twenty-three. I welcome this development in the presence of Finland’s
representatives, as in 1985 I welcomed that country’s contribution
to the EUREKA technology programme.

Your institution, in keeping with the vocation affirmed from
the outset, has accordingly become a meeting place and a place of
dialogue where relations can be developed among its various components.
Institutional co-operation has been intensified – with the European
Community – in a spirit of co-operation, not competition.

I have observed to what a great extent the Council of Europe
has shown itself able to tackle new and important issues, whether
it be in the Assembly’s work on North-South questions, the European
Social Charter, the European Code of Social Security, the conventions
to protect migrant workers, or on health problems, consumer protection,
cultural exchanges, legal and judicial co-operation, local and regional
authorities – the list is too long for me to mention them all.

It is the quality, the diversity and the richness of this
participation in the activities of the Council of Europe that have
made it possible to associate with the “necessary dream”, of which
Jean Monnet wrote in his memoirs, a fruitful field of discussion
and action.

Many issues that exercise people do not, of course, pay any
heed to frontiers or political divides. Increasingly often they
find an echo in what is sometimes called – the expression is fairly
apt – the right of future generations, particularly – and the need
for this is deeply felt – the right to an unscathed, uncontaminated
and healthy earth, the right to a clean environment with pure air
and pure water.

You have already done a considerable amount of work in this
respect. I have particularly in mind the Convention on the Conservation
of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats of 1979. But so much remains
to be done, as we can observe every day! For example, people talk
of the warming up of the atmosphere, which might result from the
excessive quantities of carbonic gas released by human activities
– the figure of twenty thousand million tonnes a year is mentioned.

And so the danger is increasing, but fortunately, thanks to
a wholesome shift in people’s thinking, awareness of the danger
is also increasing. And I am talking to an assembly that has made
a significant contribution to this awakening and that should continue
to prevent or combat everything that jeopardises the future of the human
species itself.

Your Council will, I believe, be able to continue its work
in the same way and with the same tenacity for the creation of the
European cultural identity.

This subject was dwelt on by the Chairman of the Committee
of Ministers, and rightly so. Let us take care to preserve the culture
and, in the first place, the language of each of our countries and,
within each country, those of minorities. Let us make this effort
because, when a language disappears, that signifies the death of
a long history and, probably also, the death of a hope.

While on the subject of Europe’s identity, it is surely impossible
not to refer to the audiovisual sphere. There is a certain tendency
on the part of our countries to import a growing proportion of their
programmes and to resort increasingly to third technologies, the
term coyly used to describe quite simply technologies produced outside our
continent.

It is up to Europeans to give themselves the capacity to make
their own productions. The present production of television and
cinema in our countries is estimated, I am told, at 20 000 hours
a year, whereas our countries’ needs amount to 125 000 hours for
the year 1990. It is up to Europeans to develop their own techniques, improve
quality and avoid easy solutions.

They possess a European standard and a European system of
high-definition television that can provide a basis for the future
of the audiovisual industry in Europe, and which illustrate the
existing capacities while also showing the way ahead.

I say this with all my conviction, reiterating Jean Monnet’s
words which have just been quoted. Do not let us miss this appointment.
Let us study this problem in an equitable manner, with a desire
to serve each of our cultures. Some are threatened in the immediate
future; others will be in the medium term. While there are a few,
a very few privileged countries that can rest assured of the future
– thanks to the concentration of information and the rapidity of
exchanges – it is necessary, without mistrusting them, without organising ourselves
against them, to equip ourselves with the means of disseminating
throughout Europe a whole culture drawn from the very sources of
its member countries. Otherwise, a large part of ourselves will
soon have disappeared, abolished and swept away by the great movement
of history.

There you have the problem, and it is far from having been
solved. Nor is it always very well formulated, and I think we shall
all of us make progress here. In fact, we discussed the matter at
the European Council in Rhodes last December. I regard it as very
important and everyone in Europe can join in, help take the decisions
and benefit from what is a joint safeguard.

When all is said and done, it is as well to ask a simple question,
which it is for each of you to answer: Are Europeans any less capable
than anyone else of making and broadcasting their own programmes?
Can they possibly believe that merely broadcasting other people’s
programmes, however good or necessary they may be, will leave Europe
and Europeans as history has made them, intact?

All Europeans share a common destiny, whether they belong
to the part of Europe represented here today or to the other part.
Our history has proved it and so does geography. There has to be
a genuine political will to move in that direction. What I have
just said about audiovisual matters is just as relevant to what
is termed, crudely and inappropriately, Eastern Europe. After all,
both Eastern Europe and Western Europe have a north and a south.
Moreover, not all of Western Europe lies to the West and not all
of Eastern Europe to the East. But as the terms are understood,
I have used them, though I do not like them very much.

I am aware that contacts have been established, some of them
by you, either by the Parliamentary Assembly or through governmental
co-operation. Ventures are under way with Hungary and Poland, and
your Assembly has established contacts with the Soviet Union. It
is my belief, and France’s too, that the time has come to establish
closer links between these two Europes, new links – outside any
predetermined framework – whenever this is made possible by development
in the direction the founders of the Council of Europe had in mind,
the direction of freedom.

No one need feel disqualified from taking part in this great
tendency, which, I am sure – without wishing to prophesy – will
be the making of Europe of the next millennium. There is virtually
scientific evidence which indicates that peoples who hold fast to
one another have every prospect of enduring, developing and asserting themselves
if they are capable of recognising their affinities.

The Council of Europe can continue taking bold initiatives
for co-operation between its members and with all others who are
interested. Responding to the expectations of those who, wherever
they may be, cherish freedom and, like us, see themselves as having
inherited and as inhabiting the same Europe, is – and this is the
lesson you have taught me – one of the Council of Europe’s primary
functions.

The Council of Europe, and all of us, must respond to the
divisions born of war by generously holding out community of culture
and exchange as a basis for further progress. In the short term,
why not reconsider the requirements for granting observer status
or consider new forms of association with states in the other Europe, under
arrangements it is of course for you to decide?

I believe that it is consonant with the spirit of the Council
of Europe to be prepared to go out – as the historian, Fernand Braudel,
once put it – “in all the directions of the wind”.

A little poetry does no harm.

An anniversary, whether in private or public life, is an occasion
for taking stock. I should like this 40th anniversary to let the
Council of Europe show that Europe, while consolidating itself,
is not impervious to any matter of worldwide interest and that it
is responsive to urgent humanitarian needs and to ethical and intellectual
aspirations.

Mr Chairman of the Committee of Ministers, Mr President of
the Parliamentary Assembly, Mr Secretary General, ladies and gentlemen,
need I say how pleased I am to have come to Strasbourg to remind
you that France is proud to count itself one of the founder members
of the Council of Europe, proud of what it and its partners have
achieved in these forty years, and that it will be proud, too, to
see the Council of Europe continuing its work on French soil? This,
surely, is what being a European capital is about.

On France’s behalf, I unreservedly reaffirm France’s confidence
in the Council of Europe and in all of whom it is composed.

(Lengthy and enthusiastic applause)

(The President of the Parliamentary Assembly presented the
President of the French Republic with the medal struck to mark the
40th anniversary of the Council of Europe before accompanying him
out of the Assembly Chamber.)